Edito

In the aftermath of the convention on biodiversity preservation (Rio, 1992), several Biological Resources Centers (BRCs) for ex situ preservation and diffusion of genetic resources of domestic animals have been developed in France. BRCs dedicated to genomic and reproductive material are to meet two major societal and scientific challenges: the erosion of genetic diversity in domestic populations and the new era opened by genomics for the understanding of relationships between genotype and phenotype in domestic animals.

In this context, the French government is supporting an ambitious program, CRB-Anim, whose main objective is to build a functional network connecting domestic animal BRCs, so that know-how and data can be shared and optimized, the materials can be better characterized and documented, and the collections are increased and better distributed.